Last night, rapper 50 Cent traveled to his family’s South Carolina hometown to trace his roots for the VH1 Rock Doc “50 Cent: The Origin of Me.”

You can watch the show on VH1’s website. If you watch, there are some bleeps in a rap at the beginning, but the rest of the show is clean. And good.

In the show, 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson), who grew up in New York City, travels to Edgefield, SC, where his mom’s family came from. At a reunion, the family talks about what the segregated town was like in the 1950s.

50 visits Edgefield’s genealogical society. The librarian (who had to have been briefed ahead of time, but did such a good job of being nonchalant that I wondered) pulls the WWI draft card of 50's grandfather Will Jenkins from a "Jenkins File" (the society keeps surname files on local families). She also helps 50 use the census on microfilm to find Will’s father Peter, and Peter’s mother Jane.

In the 1870 census, Jane was living with a local prominent citizen, probably her former slaveowner.

50 also visited the Old Edgefield Pottery museum, with vessels created by “Dave the Slave,” who incorporated sayings and dates into his work. The proprietor refers to Dave as the first rapper.

She also tells him about the Red Shirts, a precursor to the Klu Klux Klan, and advises him to study history to learn about “Mongolian slaves” in South Carolina. Interesting. There’s some uncomfortable giggling when 50 gently challenges her about these slaves and how slaves were treated.

Later, at the Edgefield County Archives, the archivist shows 50 the slave inventory for Jane’s owner, R.G.M. Dunovant, son-in-law of prominent citizen Whitfield Brooks. The archivist finds a reference to Jane, daughter of Adrene, in Whitfield’s will. If that’s 50’s Jane, Adrene is his fourth-great-grandmother.

The archivist introduces 50 to a woman who’s researching what she calls the brutal side of slavery. In contrast to the woman he met earlier, she acknowledges the treatment of local slaves and gives an example from a coroner's report detailing the death of a slave.

50 next meets a Dunovant descendant, who asks 50 about his career, compliments his song “In Da Club” (the one that says “Go shorty/It’s your birthday”) and gives him a piece of Edgefield pottery. 50 says it’s a turnaround from the days his family talked about, when black people always used the back door at whites’ homes.

You don't have to be a fan of rap or a member of VH1's typical demographic to like this show. 50 Cent has a tough image as a rapper, but you don't see that here. To me, the show feels a little younger and a little less refined than 'Who Do You Think You Are?" which makes it very approachable. You learn about both one person's genealogy and how it ties into what was happening locally and across the country.

Got a burning question only an archivist could answer? Here’s a great opportunity to ask it: On Ask Archivists Day, a worldwide Twitter event taking place June 9, you can pose an archival question for archivists to address.

Start by following @AskArchivists on Twitter (you'll need a Twitter account, of course). Then on June 9, tweet your question and include the hashtag #AskArchivists. You can direct your question to any archivist who’s joining in, or to a specific participating archive—for example, including @USNatArchives in your tweet directs your question to the US National Archives.

A new website called Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names will launch in September. The site will contain free, searchable information about enslaved Virginians named in manuscripts at the Virginia Historical Society. Read more about the project here.

FindMyPast.co.uk has completed its two-year project to make the English and Welsh birth, marriage and death records on its site easier to use. This final installment of the project makes more than 85 million death records searchable at once, with as little as a surname. The site’s death records include England & Wales deaths, 1837-2006; British nationals who died overseas, 1818-2005; British nationals armed forces deaths, 1796-2005; and British nationals who died at sea, 1854-1890.

We're contacting the winners to deliver your prizes. Congratulations to them, and thank you to everyone who entered. We enjoyed reading about how you got into genealogy! (You can see the entries on the Facebook pages for Family Tree Magazine and Geni.)

(What can I say, I guess I'm in a bit of a melodramatic mood this morning!) Next Monday, May 23, begins a new session of Family Tree University and a new opportunity to find out what you need to know in order to bust through that big bad brick wall.

Courses run for four weeks with one lesson per week. That's except for Lisa Louise Cooke’s Google Master Class, which combines three courses over eight weeks; and Discover Your Family Tree, a two-week course especially for beginners.

Click each link for more about the class, including a syllabus, student feedback, and even preview videos for some. You can save 20 percent on registration by using offer code FTU0511.

We’re hearing there's great attendance at this year’s conference, and that the first two days in the exhibit hall were crowded.

The 2012 NGS conference is May 9-12 in Cincinnati (also the hometown of Family Tree Magazine) and the 2013 conference will be in Las Vegas.

FamilySearch has set an annual goal to add 200 million record images to its free online records search. Its 2012 RootsTech conference will be Feb. 2-4 in Salt Lake City.

Archivist of the United States David Ferrerio, speaking at the NGS opening session, said that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is digitizing the 1940 census in-house and it’ll be available—but not yet indexed by name—on on NARA's website April 2, 2012. It won’t be on any commercial websites on that date.

Ancestry.com will begin indexing the census records as soon as they’re available and will post the indexed records online later in the year, the company announced at a conference reception.